In Past Show

About Dora García

Dora García’s loosely scripted, open-ended stories, performances, and scenarios analyze (and at times psychoanalyze) language’s impact on the social formation of identity. Creating spaces for intervention, her works negotiate the relationship between author and actor and audience and public, a dynamic García characterizes as “the one who speaks and the one who listens.” Borrowing elements of Joycean literature, Boalian theater, and “unofficial” translations of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, García’s performances draw visitors and passersby into conversations, often without their awareness. Her work The Beggar’s Opera (2007), based on the character of Filch from John Gay’s 1728 opera and on Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera (1928), interfered with and contradicted the expectations of its participants in the city of Muenster, Germany. Garcia has represented Spain in the Venice Biennale.